Menu

Monthly Archives: June 2015

I once tried my hand at writing a comic book, or “graphic novel” if you prefer, though with the stick figures I used for the people it wasn’t very graphic. Didn’t have the patience to draw out the people more realistically, or even to make them cartoony.

For the subjects in this endeavor I used characters from two of my favorite tv shows, The Dukes Of Hazzard, and Knight Rider. In my story, the “Nukes” were a family who lived in an old nuclear power plant, of which you can see part of in the title panel. They have a car called the “Private Lee”(I know, kind of obvious) which is continually losing mechanical parts as it drives along, and also has the ability to “talk” via the 01 on the door panel. Of course, it can only talk in words or phrases that begin with “O” so it doesn’t have that much to say.

The guests in the story are Mikel Knit and his sarcastic talking car, named… uh, well, I won’t say it, but it rhymes with the name of the car from the real show Knight Rider, “KITT”.

To add to the excitement(whatever), there is even a visit from the starship Enterprise from Star Trek on the second page. Also look for a cameo from one of my favorite characters from the Sunday comics, Bill The Cat from Bloom County.

I never finished this comic. I think I just couldn’t decide where to go with it after the Enterprise showed up, and/or I just lost interest in it. Maybe I will finish it… someday. Until then, please enjoy, some of, The Nukes Of Hazardous!

BTW, it is kind of hard to read. Especially the first page. Just do your best.

Back in my idealistic 20’s, I sometimes found myself incensed at stuff that the media of the time told us we were supposed to be incensed about(I think they’ve quit doing that, haven’t they? No sarcasm tag necessary, right?).

What follows are a few of those things.

The first one deals with the war in the Persian Gulf. Like the good little – uninformed – liberal that I was at that time, I believed that the war was “all about oil” and Bush was a warmonger just like Saddam, and that the military brass was censoring all the good stuff out of the reports. You know, all the stuff that needs to be exposed and that regular citizens like me needed to know about, not thinking whether or not that stuff might risk soldier’s lives if it were out in the open. Luckily that kind of thinking was a burp in the digestive system of my life(huh?), and I woke up to clearer and more objective thinking. In the case of the Gulf War, my thinking on it started to change when I heard the Kuwaitis asking for our help. We could not turn our backs. And thankfully, at that time, we didn’t.

The next cartoon deals with the “war on drugs” and the perceived hypocrisy going along with it, where the politicians talk a good talk, but then are taking deals under the table with the drug cartels, while the people most effected by drug abuse are used and discarded. This one may or may not be more factual, given the true racist history of one of the political parties in the U.S. with regards to using minorities by keeping them in their voting bloc while at the same time destroying their chances for personal and economic growth. I will let you guess which one.

And last but not least let us not forget gun owners and hunters of poor, defenseless animals. These two cartoons manage to smear not only those two groups but also gets a dig into capitalism and business. Because as we all know, if hunters wouldn’t hunt them, animals would just self-regulate and not over-populate the land, and if we stayed off “their” land, there would be far fewer car/deer accidents, right? (Once again, no sarc tag needed, I hope)

I was in a discussion a few years back(ok, more than a few) with my brother – who happens to be a hunter – about the sniper who was going around shooting people in random areas. The whole country was on edge it seemed, not knowing where this guy was going to strike next. When we got around to who it could possibly be, my brother simply said, “I don’t know. But I’ll guarantee one thing. It’s not a hunter.”

Later on after they caught the guy, we found out my brother was right about that. In fact, the hunters I have come across are not the dumb hicks you see portrayed on tv and the movies. Most are genuine, honest folks who simply love the outdoors and the challenge of hunting. A couple of hunters even stopped to help me out when I had hit a deer with my car. I was with my wife and two stunned kids(one nephew) in the car, and I really appreciate them taking care of getting the dying deer off the road for me, and humanely put it out of it’s misery. I had no weapon of any kind with me, so I was really at a loss of what to do about the wounded deer. I mean, I could have driven over it again, but I don’t think the kids would have liked that too much.JK.

It just goes to show you, for a lot of things in life, that you can’t judge a book by its cover. Or by how and what the media thinks you should judge.